Jessica Lynch: tough being the Ace in the Hole

Many times and oft pieces here have marvelled or despaired at the doleful effects of conjunctions and combinations of politicians and journalists.

The Lynch case - such a signal example of the species - was too famous to be noticed by this humble blog. But something of a milestone has been reached which, I think, deserves a pause for reflection.

Larry Flynt's Hustler magazine has pre-war photos of Lynch on a beach in Texas. According to Flynt,

...they show Lynch topless and cavorting with two men stationed with her at Fort Bliss, Tex., before she shipped off to Iraq last spring

And

According to two people who have seen them, the person they identify as Lynch is wearing just jeans in one photo and a blue thong in another.

How many zillions of girls of Lynch's age around the so-called Free World have cavorted with guys on beaches topless? No matter, Hustler will have those mammaries in glowing colour, the supermarket tabs will find a way to print them (with digitised pasties, no doubt), and the serious press will wax lyrical (and profitable) on the subject for a collective few thousand column-inches.

Now that's entertainment!

But, then, it always has been, since being so decreed by the Bush truth distortion machine - that first WaPo report on April 3 which pegged her as Ms Rambo [1]. If you were OC Propaganda for the side waging pre-emptive war, and a cute, blonde Southern girl fell into your lap - as it were - you'd do exactly the same [2].

It's not new: look up the 1934-born Dionne Quintuplets, for instance - though, according to this, if you did, you could only manage to speak to two of them.

And, on the military side, Sergeant York, of course, whose heroism on October 8 1918 was apparently rewarded in 1961 by the IRS attempting to seize all his assets for back taxes - Jessica, you are warned! And the five Sullivan brothers, who died during, or in the days following, the sinking on November 13 1942 of the USS Juneau in Guadalcanal's Iron Bottom Sound, and were therefore unable to participate in the hoopla.

(I'm surprised there aren't tons of general sites with long lists of médiatique American heroes going back the War of Independence. There are plenty of sites - but all with some angle - Hispanic heroes, or baseball heroes, or shilling tacky souvenirs of heroes.)

An unclean copy of the April 3 piece - there may be better where that came from. I get the impression that the War Party aren't keen on us remembering the April 3 WaPo effort. They'd rather focus on the John Kampfner BBC report, which - I think, to common consent wrongly - suggested that the rescue party were firing blanks. The WaPo piece probably had a good many times more impact (was this ever measured?) But that's not the kind of detail to concern those fisking for the other side.

There is a Baltimore Suntimeline and a longer piece from Journalism.net on the progress of the Jessica Lynch disinformation campaign.

A piece examining the Lynch affair from the feminist viewpoint; and a piece on modern heroes which looks as if it might be interesting. (I'm heroed out now!)